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tion. The menstrual periods often exist, at least, in the commencement, and so the alteration in health cannot be attributed to their derangement or suppression. It is not uncommon to see the shape impaired.
The moral symptoms are similar to those of the opposite sex. They are sadness or melancholy, solitude or indifference, an aversion to legitimate pleasures, and a host of other characteristics common to the two sexes. The condition called "nymphomania" sometimes ensues, in which the most timid girl is transformed into a termagant, and the most delicate modesty to a furious audacity which even the effrontery of prostitution does not approach.
Let it not be supposed that the absence of the seminal secretion in woman, renders this vice less destructive than in man. Ubi irritatio ibi fluxus (where there is irritation there is increased secretion), is a medical maxim, and the increase of the proper secretions of the female organs under habitual irritation, is enormous and extremely debilitating. Witness the sad examples of leucorrheal discharge (called the "whites"), now so common as to be well nigh the rule rather than the exception.
Deslandes says: "I have reason to believe, from a great number of facts presented to me in practice, that of every twenty cases of leuchorrhea ('whites'), or of inflammation of the vulva or vagina in children and young girls, there are at least fifteen or eighteen which result from masturbation!" And again: "Repeated admissions have also convinced me that leucorrhea and chronic inflammation of the womb, so common with the women of our cities, most frequently owe their origin to former, and sometimes to recent, excesses of this nature!"
We have termed onanism a solitary vice, and nothing is more just. It has also been termed a contagious vice, and
